GREEK CATHOLICS IN AMERICA 189 



for them in the Russian Empire), originally an allusion to 

 their stature as contrasted with the Muscovites. Their lan- 

 guage is known as Ruthenian or Little Russian, and is spoken in 

 Northern Hungary, Galicia, Bukowina, and in the Provinces 

 of Volhynia, Podolia, Chelm and Kiev, in Russia. It is quite 

 similar to the Russian language of the Russian Empire (some- 

 times called Great Russian), bearing about the same relation 

 to it as Lowland Scotch does to English, or Plattdeutsch to 

 German, and rather closer than Portuguese does to Spanish. 

 The Ruthenians (in Austria) and Little Russians (in Russia) 

 use the Russian alphabet and write their language in almost 

 the same orthography as the Great Russians of St. Petersburg 

 and Moscow, but they pronounce it in many cases very differ- 

 ently, quite as the French and English might pronounce differ- 

 ently a word written the same in each language. This fact 

 has led in late years to a recension of the Russian alphabet in 

 Galicia and Bukowina by the governmental authorities, and by 

 dropping some letters and adding one or two more and then 

 spelling all the words just as they are pronounced, they have 

 produced a new language at least to the eye. This is the "pho- 

 netic" alphabet and orthography, and as thus introduced it dif- 

 ferentiates the Ruthenian language of these provinces more 

 than ever from the Russian. The phonetic system of orthog- 

 raphy is still fiercely opposed at home and in America, and as 

 an Austrian governmental measure it is regarded by many as 

 an effort to detach the Ruthenians from the rest of the Rus- 

 sian race and in a measure to Polonize them. This battle of 

 the reformed phonetic spelling rages as fiercely in the United 

 States as in Austria. Indeed the Greek Catholic bishop here 

 has found it necessary to issue his official documents in both 

 the phonetic and the etymologic spelling (as the older form is 

 called), so as to meet the views of both parties. The phonetic 

 spelling has never been introduced among the Ruthenians in 

 Hungary, and their section of the language is still written in 

 the customary form, there and in the United States. Besides 

 the Ruthenians there are also the Slovaks who live in Northern 

 and North-western Hungary, close neighbors to the Ruthenians, 

 who are Greek Catholics, and who speak a language almost 

 like the Bohemian, yet similar to the Ruthenian. It is written, 

 however, with Roman letters, and the pronunciation follows 

 the Bohemian more than the Ruthenian. These people seem 



